mark nottingham

OxygenXML is Good Enough

Tuesday, 11 May 2004

XML

I’ve been playing around with the new OxygenXML 4.0 plug-in for Eclipse M8.

Overall, it’s very good; much better than the competition, although a lot of the slickness can be attributed to Eclipse. While it isn’t everything I want in an XML editor (don’t get lazy, guys), it’s pretty close, and cross-platform licensing is a bonus, so I’m about to take the plunge, pay the fee and switch from BBEdit, at least for XML tasks.

Hints to the Oxygen guys: I’d like it a lot more if your contextual menus were actually contextual — custom tags should be a drop-down. Also, the schema-aware editing pops up a little too eagerly sometimes. Eclipse’s find dialog isn’t good enough; do your own. Give me non-contiguous editing and I’ll love you forever.